Vintage Video: Radiohead covers The Smiths, Joy Division/New Order

With Radiohead and Thom Yorke each releasing new songs recently — and Yorke debuting his new solo band, featuring the Red Hot Chili Peppers’Flea and producer Nigel Godrich, at a tiny club in Los Angeles last night — it seemed as good a time as any to resurrect a couple of classic video clips to inaugurate a new feature on the site: Vintage Video. (And generally, the term “vintage” will be applied to material that’s significantly more dated than this, but, hey, we’ve been looking for an excuse to post these clips.)

On Nov. 9, 2007, about a month after the infamous pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows, Radiohead hosted a Webcast for fans during which the band members showed some pre-recorded video, spun some records and performed a few of their own songs, including “Reckoner” and “I Might Be Wrong,” as well as a couple choice covers: The Smiths’ “Headmaster Ritual,” off of Meat Is Murder (and shown above), and “Ceremony,” one of the last Joy Division songs written before Ian Curtis’ suicide, and the first single released by that band’s survivors, after they rechristened the group New Order (shown below).